Death in the Pot

Death in the Pot

2 Kings 4:38-41

Welcome back to the ongoing saga of Elisha the Israelite prophet. 

You’ll recall that over a period of four weeks in worship (this is the third) we’re making our way through one chapter of the book of 2 Kings, four stories from the fourth chapter of the book.  Last week we heard the long and involved story of Elisha and the Shunammite woman, where Elisha got busy doing very powerful things, like bringing the woman’s dead child back to life.  Today our story is a shorter passage, but Elisha pulls out the magic yet again.

Remember that whoever compiled 2 Kings was telling the story of a leadership transition.  But let’s back up a little bit in Israelite history to give us even more of a framework to understand today’s text.  Think way back to recall that the Jews were slaves in Egypt.  They made their way out of captivity and wandered around the desert for forty years, all of that led by Moses.  Finally, they came across the Promised Land, Canaan, a land filled with all the good things God promised them when they lived for so long in brutal captivity longing for freedom.  By then Moses had died, so his successor Joshua took over.  They took the land and fought off enemies and established their place in the ancient world. 

Fast forward a couple thousand years or so until the Israelites were no longer governed by just God—they had evolved into a monarchy and along with that came all the political intrigue you might expect.  Imagine the people drifting further and further away from the covenantal relationship they’d had with Yahweh—the special promises that had led them out of Egypt and kept them going through so many times of doubt and fear. 

By the time Elisha has come on the scene the people are split into two kingdoms with two different kings.  Depending on the mood of the king and the political situation surrounding them, the people would swing from studiously following Yahweh to worshipping the pagan gods of their neighbors.  The situation was bad and it seemed like it was getting worse, so Yahweh started sending prophets, holy trouble makers to say things nobody wanted to hear, to shake the people up and make them realize they were drifting far from the God who had offered their ancestor Abraham a priceless promise of covenant and relationship.  And…that if they didn’t get right with God, there would be serious consequences for them.

By the time Elisha had taken over as Yahweh’s main prophet, the whole country was saturated with the worship of Baal, a pagan god or gods of the people around them.  Known in various iterations as the god of thunderstorms—of rain that nourished the land so food could grow or a kind of god of fertility, Baal was the one the people of the region turned toward for these very basic and life-giving parts of their existence.

Well, then, talk about a perfect storm.

The people had grown more and more distant from Yahweh; the voices of the prophets marginalized and stifled in ways they had never been—ever—in the history of the people, and all their neighbors were busy worshipping Baal.  Add to that the fact that the region was in the middle of a crippling famine—no rain, no fields, no food…?  All of that combined with years and years of habitual turning away from Yahweh made the people even less receptive, if possible, to the message of the prophets, and more ready to try any other course of action they could find. 

Remember that Elisha was a new leader, a new head prophet, following the formidable force that was the prophet Elijah, and Elisha had assumed leadership of the company of prophets, a small group of faithful prophets who followed in the tradition of Elijah and tried to keep the message of repentance alive among the people.

But making Elisha’s transition even harder, Elijah was a pretty amazing prophet, culminating his prophetic tenure with nice touches like ascending into heaven in a fire-y chariot and all of that.  Plus, the social and political situation had gotten even worse than when Elijah was the head prophet.  Elisha assumed leadership in the middle of all of this.  He had to establish credibility—and fast—if he had any hope of making a name for himself at the least . . . not to mention even getting close to accomplishing what the prophets desperately hoped for: full repentance of the people, turning back to Yahweh with their whole hearts, and setting their country on a new course toward full obedience.

So remember that the stories we’re reading in 2 Kings chapter 4 are stories told to support the impression that Elisha was a prophet worth his salt, someone whose leadership the company of prophets could feel confidence in, and a mouthpiece of God the people should definitely heed.

Raising children from the dead, as Elisha did for the family of the Shunammite woman last week, helps with that I’m thinking. 

So does today’s story.

Elisha left the home of the Shunammite woman—at least that’s how the text transitions into this next story.  He heads to Gilgal, where the company of the prophets was headquartered.  Scholars have hypothesized that Gilgal was sort of a Prophet training headquarters—where they gathered together, trained newcomers, studied, etc.  It was a logical place—right outside of Jericho and the first camp the Israelites made after they crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land that very first time.  Elisha made his headquarters on a hill overlooking fields, which in better days produced enough food to feed the prophets as they studied and trained. 

When Elisha returned to Gilgal in this passage, it seems the prophets gathered there were hungry.  It wasn’t surprising that they had run out of resources and ideas in the state of famine in which they whole countryside was immersed.  Seeing they were hungry and, I would imagine, feeling pretty flush with the success over the whole raising a kid from the dead experience, Elisha instructs the prophets to put a pot on the fire and start cooking what will be enough stew to feed the whole crowd.

Somebody—maybe one of the younger, newer, super enthusiastic recruits to the company of the prophets, was sent out into the surrounding fields to gather herbs.  No matter what the stew would look like eventually, it had to be seasoned and apparently there was enough hope of finding some tasty herbs that one of the prophets was dispatched to search.

Again, the Bible has some really funny stories in it!  This prophet, presumably enthusiastic to do a good job and maybe trying extra hard to impress Elisha, the new clearly powerful and influential prophet, saw some gourds the text says, growing in the field, and decided to gather a few to add some heft and substance to this stew they were making.

Given the famine in the land and the general desperation of the people, it would seem to me, anyway, that one might be a little suspicious about all the available gourds or squash or whatever they looked like, but maybe this enthusiastic prophet’s mom never took the time to really teach him how to cook?

Anyway, he gourds he found and cut up for the stew were, let’s say, not the kind of thing you would immediately rush out to eat.  Scholars think that the plant the prophet harvested and put into the stew was a wild vine that grew untended and was never intentionally cultivated.  It was probably a citrallus colocynthus, which apparently looks in the leaves a little like a squash but definitely does not taste like a squash.  Those of you who know Latin might already have a hint of what the effects of eating this plant might be, but I will tell you that it tastes very bitter. 

And you might ingest it, for example, if you were interested in stimulating some, shall we say, purgative experiences. 

And, if you eat it in large amounts it can wreak havoc with your digestive tract and make you really, really sick—even kill you. 

One scholar says that if you ingest it in small amounts you might not die, but you might feel like you’re going to die, which, any way you look at it, cannot be a good state of affairs.  All of that to say: neither for taste nor for nutritional effect would you ever, ever cut this plant up and put it into your stew.  Bad idea all the way around.

And all the company of the prophets, hungry though they were, started to get a very strong sense of that very thing as they dug in.  I’m thinking that a really gifted narrative preacher could really have a lot of fun with this scene, but I think I’ll let your imaginations take it from here.  Clutching their stomachs and maybe even rolling on the ground they were feeling bad enough to exclaim, “O man of God, there is death in the pot!”

So…anybody have a suggestion for the devotional application of this text? 

I have to tell all of you that as I read this story this week my mind kept coming back to that poor member of the company of prophets who had been sent out to gather herbs for the long-awaited dinner they were going to share with the prophet Elisha.  It made me think of an early ministry experience I had, when I was feeling that professional ministry was something I might want to pursue in my life and realizing that following that course of action as a young woman would place me solidly in a very small minority always struggling for an opportunity.  Perhaps you’ve been like this at some point in your life: I was burning with passion.  I finally could see some clear direction in my life, and I wanted to run with every cell in my body toward serving God.  And not only that: I also had plans to change the world on my way.  Watch out anyone who would dare to try to slow me down.  God was CALLING me.

It happened during this time in my life that I was assigned through a class to lead a group of volunteers to help a small, struggling local church clear out its basement to ready it for what everyone hoped would be a new program to serve the neighborhood.  I was up for the challenge!  The pastor at this church was nearing retirement—or past retirement—anyway, he was really, really old.  And grouchy.  And tired.  Every time I talked with him I could hear the exhaustion and impatience in his responses to me.  He wanted the basement to be cleaned out, but he had all these rules: don’t change this, don’t move this, don’t get rid of this. 

Ridiculous.

With all the enthusiasm of youth and calling, I decided that the pastor of that dying church was just too grouchy and probably didn’t really even feel a calling anymore, like I did, and that I would just take matters into my own hands. 

Not to belabor what truly was a long and involved story, at the end result of this experience was my insistence that several large pieces of air conditioning equipment being stored in the basement be moved out to the curb.  My reasoning?  Well, they were taking up a lot of space that could be used for ministry, for serving the Lord . . . and I had looked carefully at the plugs on the ends of the electrical connection cords—they were so antiquated, I thought, that they didn’t even work in modern plugs.  Who would keep stuff like that??!?

Out the equipment went to the curb and it was quickly snatched up by folks who collected and sold used machinery and furniture because, as you might have already guessed, that A/C equipment was not antiquated at all.  Actually, it was quite valuable.  And the pastor had agreed to store it for a few weeks for a church member who had plans to install it in his house.

This horrifying story of my own misdirected fervor is exactly what made me feel so much sympathy for the gourd-gathering prophet in 2 Kings today.  Things were bad: there was famine, the country was falling apart, the company of prophets was a small voice calling for big change. 

Elisha the prophet had made it to town offering them a little relief, a warm bowl of nourishing stew, so they could gather their strength and head out to face the daunting work ahead of them.  Perhaps young, definitely filled with ardor and conviction, that prophet, the one who cut up and added the poisonous gourds to the soup, must have been mortified, wondering how he could have made such a mess of things when all he wanted to do was follow Yahweh!

The literary objective in this story, as in the story of last week, is to remind us how powerful the prophet Elisha is.  I found it helpful this week, though, to tell the story from the perspective of the poor guy who added the gourds, just to feel again the sinking feeling he must have felt when he realized the series of events that had begun to unfold.

True to what we know about Elisha, though, he comes to the rescue and saves the day!  The powerful prophet of Yahweh adds a little bit of meal—of flour—to the stew, and somehow that manages to draw the poison out of the pot.  The prophets eat the stew and are nourished, and everyone there (plus all of us who read the story later) know again that Elisha is a powerful man of God.  Whew!

It’s a great story, familiarity with which is very good for those who worry about our facility at biblical trivia.  But the more pressing question for us this morning is: what can we, modern readers of the text, hear in this story from 2 Kings and take away with us to the work of discipleship in our own lives and the challenge of being the church together at this time and place?

As I wondered about that this week, it occurred to me that this is a challenging and exciting time in the life of our church.  At this time of the year we continue to work through the process of stewardship.  Our budget committee begins the hard work of planning for the finances of 2011.  Trustees, Personnel, Camp Fraser Task Force, Mission Board, and so many other leadership groups in our church, planning for a future we cannot see and making decisions that sometimes feel they are only the beginning of so much that needs to be done around here.  Our church is growing and blossoming into what God has planned for it.  It’s exciting!  And I think many of us would affirm that we feel called…we feel energized by the spirit and potential of this place.

Energy and enthusiasm and calling, however, can wane in the face of the daunting tasks ahead of us.  Like the little company of prophets gathered around Elisha, we can clearly see that we exist in a society where not too many people go to church. 

You don’t have to look far around here to see that the challenges of maintaining this beautiful building are endless. 

And while we welcome new faces every single week, it’s tempting to wonder if there are enough new faces with enough commitment to bring to being the promise and potential of this community. 

All of these contextual details and more might lead us to read the story of death in the pot and firmly clasp our hands in our laps.  There’s no way we want to run toward promise with enthusiasm and energy only to find that our efforts are misdirected, that we make a mistake, that the decisions we choose are not the right ones!  No way!  It’s much safer to sit on the sidelines and watch with a removed interest.  It’s a lot less risky to invest less and risk even less, just until we can see for sure which way this big ship is going to turn.

All of these things are true.

And all of these things may be the best, most prudent course of action.  But they are not radical discipleship.  And they are not the urgent and pressing way of Jesus Christ, who calls us out from the comfort of our lives and into risky lives of commitment, to follow a call we cannot know fully or hear clearly, to walk down a path whose direction we cannot possibly ascertain.

In our eagerness, we could make a mistake.

We can’t see too far up ahead, so we might turn the wrong way.

We could end up making decision that prove unwise.

As the people of Israel read the story of Elisha they were reminded of the power of God that Elisha embodied—power enough that the prophet could step in and redeem a situation that seemed to have gone horribly wrong. 

Perhaps as we, people of God at Calvary Baptist Church, read this ancient story of Elisha, we may remember that the decisions before us, while surely important in the life of this community of faith, are ultimately and urgently guided by the hand of God.

We may not always know the way; we can’t see what’s ahead.  But we follow a God who redeems our best efforts, even when the landscape around us seems desolate.

Claim the story of the prophet Elisha and the company of the prophets to remember today the miraculous presence of God. 

And move forward to wherever is next with confidence and courage.

Amen.