Transcript
The Spirit Empowers
First Baptist Richmond, June 29, 2025
Third Sunday after Pentecost
2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14
When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, “Tell me what I may do for you before I am taken from you.” Elisha said, “Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit.”
There’s a place in Mark’s Gospel where a woman touches the hem of Jesus’ garment and immediately (because that’s Mark’s favorite word: immediately) feels in her body that she has been healed of her disease. But Mark also tells us that Jesus was immediately aware that power had gone out from him. He whirled around and asked, “Who touched me?” and his disciples didn’t know what to say. There was a huge crowd around Jesus, as always, pressing in on him from every side, begging him for healing. How could his disciples possibly know who had touched him? But Jesus keeps looking around until this woman, knowing what had happened to her, comes to him in fear and trembling, falls down before him, and tells him the whole truth. He says, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
I find that story fascinating for many reasons, but one of them is that Jesus felt the power go out from him. I was thinking about my smartphone, and how I use it to make calls, and send texts, and do my French lessons, and post on social media. Sometimes, when I plug it into the charger at night, it’s down to 27 percent. I say, “You and me both, friend.” Because throughout the day, with all the things I’ve had to do, I have felt the power go out from me. But Jesus, with all the things he had to do—with healing the sick, and cleansing the lepers, and raising
the dead, and casting out demons, and preaching the good news of God’s coming kingdom—must have been down to 10 percent at night, or 2 percent, or somewhere in the negative numbers.
That’s why he withdrew to those quiet places, those private places, where he could replenish his spirit through prayer. And that’s an important lesson for us. If we want to operate day after day by the power of the Holy Spirit then we need to recharge our batteries through the practice of prayer. As surely as you put your phone on a charger at night so you will wake up with a full supply of power, you need to find a quiet place where you can seek God and ask God to fill you again with the power that only he can provide. Jesus did that, and his disciples saw that, and they learned from that. In the Book of Acts, when Jesus tells them to go back to Jerusalem and wait for the power from on high, they go back to that upper room and begin to pray, just as Jesus would have, and they don’t stop praying until the Spirit shows up ten days later.
That’s what good disciples do; they do whatever they see their teacher doing. In her commentary on our reading from 2 Kings Meg Jenista mentions that in the Mishnah—the collected teachings of the ancient rabbis—disciples are advised to follow their teachers so closely that they are “powdered with the dust of their feet.” I can almost picture that, can’t you? I mentioned recently that I want to follow Jesus so closely that he can feel my hot breath on the back of his neck, but this is the same idea: to follow so closely that the dust that falls from his sandals falls onto your feet.
That’s how closely Elisha was following Elijah. If you look at the entirety of 2 Kings 2 and not just the verses selected for today’s lectionary reading, you will find that Elijah tried to shake Elisha three times. The first time was when they were
leaving Gilgal. Elijah said, “Stay here, for the Lord has sent me as far as Bethel.” But Elisha said, “As the Lord lives and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.” So they went down to Bethel. And there the “company of prophets” came out to meet them. I’ve always imagined “the company of prophets” as a group of seminary students: you know, prophets in training. They came out and said to Elisha, “Do you know that today the Lord will take your master away from you?” And he said, “Yes, I know; keep silent.”
And then Elijah said, “Elisha, stay here, for the Lord has sent me as far as Jericho.” But Elisha said, “As the Lord lives and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.” So they went down to Jericho, where there must have been another seminary, because when they got there the company of prophets came out to meet them and said to Elisha, “Do you know that today the Lord will take your master away from you?” And he said, “Yes, I know; keep silent!”
And then Elijah said to Elisha, “Stay here, for the Lord has sent me to the Jordan.” But Elisha said, “As the Lord lives and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.” So the two of them went on. And fifty men from the company of the prophets also went and stood at some distance from them, as they were both standing by the Jordan. Then Elijah took his mantle, rolled it up, and struck the water, and the Jordan parted so that he and Elisha were able to cross over on dry ground. And because Elisha was still with him, because he hadn’t allowed himself to be shaken loose, Elijah turned and said, “All right, then, what do you want me to do for you?”
Elisha said, “Please, let me inherit a double portion of your spirit.” I have to confess: that has always sounded a little arrogant to me. “Oh, you want a double portion of your master’s spirit? You want to be twice the man Elijah was?” But in
his commentary on this passage Old Testament scholar Robert Alter says that Elisha’s request could “just as easily reflect a sense of inadequacy.” That is, rather than wanting to be twice the man Elijah was, Elisha may have thought of himself as half the man Elijah was, and thought that if he was ever going to succeed him in his role as prophet he would need a double portion of his spirit.
But Elijah said, “You have asked a hard thing, yet if you see me as I am being taken from you, it will be granted you; if not, it will not.” And if you think Elisha was sticking close to him before imagine how it was now. But suddenly, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them, and Elijah ascended to heaven in a whirlwind. Elisha kept watching and crying out, “Father! Father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” But when he could no longer see him, he grasped his own clothes and tore them in two pieces. Robert Alter says it’s possible to translate that last verse in another way. He believes that Elisha was following Elijah so closely and holding on to him so tightly that when the chariot of fire separated the two of them Elijah’s tunic ripped and Elisha was left holding half of it. If it’s true it would only further emphasize how desperate Elisha was not to let his master out of his sight.
In the end, however, he couldn’t control the outcome, no matter how tightly he held on to the way things used to be, and neither can we. Elisha stood staring up into heaven, just as lost as those disciples were when Jesus ascended. But as he did he saw Elijah’s mantle come fluttering down, and he picked it up, and put it on his own shoulders. We say things like this sometimes, that someone “assumed the mantle of his predecessor.” It probably comes from this story, but it reminds me of that story from Acts where the angels ask the disciples, “Why do you stand here looking up toward heaven?” They had their own mantle to put on,
their own responsibilities to assume. Jesus had told them that they would do greater things than he had, and if they were going to do that they would need at least a double portion of his spirit. That’s why they went back to Jerusalem and began to pray.
Elisha, on the other hand, went back to the Jordan (and I love this part of the story). He took Elijah’s mantle off his shoulders. He rolled it up in just the way he had seen his master do it. He struck the waters of the Jordan with all the authority he could muster and…nothing. Nothing happened. It would have been bad enough if he had been all by himself but there, on the other side of the river, were those fifty seminary students who had come out to see Elijah off earlier. They were still there, still watching. They saw Elisha strike the water and saw that nothing happened.
But Elisha had made a deal. His master had told him, “If you see me as I am being taken from you, your request will be granted you.” And he had seen him! He had witnessed the whole thing! So, he said, “Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah? Where is he?” And when he had said it he struck the water again and this time the Jordan parted, Elisha walked across on dry ground. In other words, he did exactly what his master had done and when the company of prophets saw it they said, “The spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha.”
When will they say it about us? When will people say, “The spirit of Jesus rests on his disciples”? It may be a coincidence, but I’ve just come back from the General Assembly of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. If you know anything about that organization you know it was founded in 1991 because those of us who called ourselves “moderate” Baptists had lost the Southern Baptist Convention to the Fundamentalists, who had been trying to take it over since 1979. We finally
gave up. We had to do something else, something new. But what we did, essentially, was re-create everything we had loved about the Southern Baptist Convention. We lost the six seminaries, so we started a new one: the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, and hired some of the professors who had been fired from the SBC seminaries for being too “liberal.” We lost the mission boards, so we started a new one, and hired Keith Parks, president of the Foreign Mission Board and a member of this church, to lead it. We began to call and send our own missionaries, but to distinguish ourselves from the SBC we tried calling them something new—“Missioners.” That lasted about ten minutes.
For the first twenty years of the organization we didn’t know what we were, but we knew what we weren’t—we weren’t Fundamentalists. But we also weren’t Liberals. That much was clear. We supported women in ministry and had from the beginning, and we thought that Baptists were smart enough to read and understand the Bible for themselves, but if anyone brought up the topic of human sexuality in those days the leadership would find ways to squelch it. We weren’t ready for that, they said. It would frighten off our older members, the ones who had the money. The spirit that dominated the Fellowship in those days was the spirit of fear.
But in the past few years something has changed. I went to the breakfast hosted by the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists—that is, the Baptists who welcome members of the LGBTQ community—and that huge hotel ballroom was packed. I went to the racial justice luncheon and that room was packed. I went to the Baptist Women in Ministry luncheon and that room—or rather, those three hotel ballrooms—were packed! When Juan Garcia, a pastor from Newport News, Virginia, and the outgoing moderator of the Fellowship, gave
his closing address he gave it in Spanish. He spoke up for immigrants, and got a standing ovation that lasted a full five minutes.
But at the same meeting Paul Baxley, the Executive Coordinator, preached on the absolute centrality of Christ and closed by quoting from the hymn, “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name.” Melissa Hatfield from Missouri preached a sermon so full of the gospel of Jesus Christ I almost walked the aisle. “Come to the water,” she begged, and I was halfway out of my seat. I met missionaries from all over the world, and heard music in worship that melted my heart, I took communion with my CBF brothers and sisters, and celebrated with other churches that are bringing heaven to earth.
It shouldn’t surprise us that both things were happening in the same assembly: that people were standing up for those on the margins and also bowing down before the Lord Jesus, because that’s what he did. He was always lifting up those at the margins of society, always drawing them into the center of the circle, always making room for them at the table. If we are his disciples we will do the same.
In the third chapter of Acts, after the believers have received the Holy Spirit, Peter and John are on their way to the temple, as usual. But there at the Beautiful Gate they encounter a crippled beggar, asking for money. And they do what Jesus would do: they see him, they pay attention to him. Peter says, “Silver and gold have I none, but what I have I give to you. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, stand up and walk.” And let me remind you that the “name of Jesus” isn’t a magic formula. It’s not like saying, “Abracadabra.” It simply means that whatever I am doing, whether it’s offering a prayer or performing an action, I am doing in a way that is consistent with the nature and character of Jesus. And that’s what Peter
did. He did exactly what Jesus would do. He reached out his hand to a crippled beggar, and when he had made the connection he felt the power of the Holy Spirit run down his arm and into the man like an electrical current that jolted him to his feet.
The spirit of Jesus rested on Peter. He did exactly what his master would have done. And if we follow in those footsteps we, too, will see those who have been overlooked by the world, we will pay attention to them, and in the name of Jesus we will do something for them. It won’t be easy and it won’t be popular. It will require power that we don’t have. But if we pray for that power, and receive that power, and use that power to do what Jesus would do then the world may say about us: “The spirit of Jesus rests on the people of Richmond’s First Baptist Church.”
—Jim Somerville © 2025