So here's something you may not know, but my close friends and family know. And it probably drives them crazy. When something happens that is out of my control, I want to do something. And usually, the thing I want to do has nothing to do with the thing that is out of my control. But sitting still is completely off the table.
Sometimes, I'm sure it drives friends crazy. You could call and say, “My computer just died.” And my response will be, “I have a ham. Can I bring you a ham?”
This has always been so. In Chattanooga, a few years ago, our stove finally quit. It was late at night and we didn't need to cook. But I got up every hour to just walk into the kitchen and stand there, looking at it, measuring the space for a new one, wondering which door we should bring the new one in. A year ago, when Mom told me she was having a heart catheterization, I vacuumed the stairs. A while back Becca had some surgery, and I started cooking food she couldn't eat and cleaning the cabinets. Not her cabinets – MY cabinets. If ever Brooks tells me something bad is happening on the phone, I immediately start walking around the house, phone in one hand and touching things on shelves and counters with the other, putting them just so.
My reaction always seems to be, “What can I do?”
So here we are this Sunday. Fiery chariots. Dazzling clothes. Magic mantles. Blinding clouds. The end of the liturgical season we call Epiphany,
. . . and our readings for the week are full of mind-bending wonders. Elijah ascends to heaven in a whirlwind, and Jesus transfigures on a mountaintop.
There’s nothing subtle about these spectacular stories; today we stand with undimmed eyes and witness God’s glory in its fullness.
As miraculous and light-filled as they are, each story has one dude that's a nervous wreck.
Elisha is handwringing, worried that his mentor is leaving and he's not up to the task that Elijah is leaving him with. Elisha reacts as we might if we were standing upon a threshold. Everything he has known is about to change, and he is filled with pain and bewilderment. Can he trust his calling in the absence of Elijah's reassuring presence? Can he learn to hear the voice of God on his own? Can he, a loyal and eager follower, become a leader instead?
And Peter has absolutely no idea what to make of the miracle he's witnessing and wants to start a construction project. Something to keep his mind focused on some normality. Because Peter, like Elisha before him, finds himself, as we all do from time to time, in a situation beyond his comprehension, entirely out of his control, and his first thought may well have been to do something, anything, to bring order or understanding to something which was entirely beyond his comprehension.
It's like both these guys are trying to control something they never could control.
And by trying to control events, by trying to reframe them in a way they can deal with, they run the risk of missing something. Something truly awesome. By trying to stay in control, by trying to keep things from slipping from normal into something different, they miss God, when God is there right in front of them, what God is offering them right then.
And so I see myself in these guys today. Maybe now more than ever at the end of this last year of not being able simply ‘do’ what I have always done. For try as I might, I have not been able as I always did to put my world in normal boxes (or booths) of my own routine, controlling the issues that arise in whatever ways I always could.
Because of this pandemic, this virus, none of us can do what we have always done. We can't able to play our parts in a way that makes sense to us anymore. And while there was nothing inherently wrong with how it was before, these days, out of necessity, it seems, we are being taken to a different place.
Because I know that these days I cannot simply go and do and fix things. I cannot go home and see how Mom is doing or help Brian repair a leak or prepare the garden for the spring. I cannot stay busy as I worry about this or that. I can't go visit a hospital and be and pray and hold a hand and listen deeply and pray again. I can send a text and offer prayer on the phone. And I can pray and pray and pray from here, in this house.
But through all of this it seems that all we can really do is simply put our friends and family, and all our cares, all our loves and all our joys into God’s hands.
God's hands, where they have been all along.
It is our hands as we simply wait on the goodness of God which comes in healing and hope and peace and life itself. Only now I think that this has always been so. And I wonder if in my long engrained impulse to go and do, if maybe I didn’t always allow myself to see that. To receive that.
As for Jesus, I imagine him loving Peter, and me – all of us, really – but wondering when we would finally get it, that the gifts of God are not his to control, but just to receive.
And then to give away.
And I imagine Jesus' eyes smiling a little as he sees Peter’s inability to just be still and take it all in. As much as he wanted to be, offered to be, tried to be, Peter could not control what was happening right before him. And neither can we be: in control that is. Like Peter – and Elisha centuries before him – all we can do is receive what God is giving, and try to give it away. All we can do is stand on the riverbank or on the mountain top and watch and wait to see what God will offer next.
During this time, the Coronatide, God is still at work. In this time when things are so beyond my control, I have to dome to the conclusion that I can only clean my counter tops so many times, and God is still at work. Waiting for me to stop what I'm doing and see the miracle of the life-giving, healing Spirit that has been there the whole time.