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“Courage is fear that has said its prayers.” You may remember that the Reverend Linda brought us this Anne Lamott quote in her sermon last week, and hearing it got me wondering if there are certain kinds of prayers that better lead to courage. Is simply showing up to pray good enough, or are we expected to come before God in a particular way when saying our prayer, and which particular way transmutes fear into courage?

My grandmother taught me how to pray when I was a young child. Sitting on the edge of my bed, she would ask God to take care of each and every one of our family members, as many as she could think of to name, and sometimes I would help her complete the list. Then she would thank God for something good or ask a special favor. These were prayers of thanksgiving and petition, simple but no less beautiful, remembering our dependence on God for all things. “Thank you, God; now, I need something.” This is an ancient and valid form of prayer, but this was not the only way that Grammy said her prayers. She was a loving and complicated person, prone to frustration. When she was tired, worried, or flustered, she put her hand in the air and cried out, “Lord!” One word, like a mother calling her child by his full name. He knows he’s in trouble, now! She called on the Lord with force, invoked him almost as if commanding his presence, sometimes a hint of anger in her voice. And then she would fall silent. I think that, in those moments, she was waiting for fear, disappointment, the shock of realized need – to become courage.

How could she pray like this, calling out to God with such temerity? Then again, Elisha does much the same in our Old Testament reading this morning. After he promises to follow his mentor three times, refuses to be turned away on three legs of the journey, and ignores the company of prophets who discourage him either out of pity or annoyance – after all this, he witnesses the death of Elijah. All this loyalty, all this love, and for what?

Sure, Elijah “ascends,” whatever that means, but as far as Elisha and the rest of the living are concerned, the prophet is dead. Set aside the strange metaphysical questions here and focus on the interpersonal relationship, the traumatic impact this separation has on a deeply devoted protégé. We might imagine the ascension as a beautiful spiritual experience, the final exaltation of a good prophet, but stand in the place of Elisha, when the fiery horses and their wagon descend and wedge themselves between him and his beloved teacher, as if the Lord of Legions adds insult to this injury. As Elijah is going up, Elisha cries out, “Avi, avi – my father, my father…” This is loss, this is separation, and from the vantage point of the earth plane, this is death.

Elisha loved Elijah like Ruth loved Naomi. Three times Naomi tells Ruth to turn back, go home to her family, and three times Ruth clings to her beloved mother-in-law against all reason. Three times Elijah offers Elisha the opportunity to turn back, mercifully sparing him the wound of witnessing transcendence. But Elisha follows him to Beth-El, where Jacob saw angels ascending a ladder to heaven. He follows him to Jericho, where walls tumbled down for Joshua. He follows him as far as the Jordan river which reversed its course for the legions of Israel, only to watch God’s own legions take away his beloved. At the border between Israel and Moab they leave their homeland for enemy territory, they go over river Jordan, they part waters, they part the veil, and leave the land of the living to walk in a place of desolation. Elisha loves Elijah like Jesus loves Lazarus – he would descend into the grave to raise him up to life, but this is far worse than the death of Lazarus, for Elijah has not gone to some grave to await judgment, but directly to God. How terrible!

Elisha rends his garments, picks up the mantle of Elijah, and returns to the banks of the Jordan river, now it is up to him to find a way through. He watched Elijah do it before, he saw his spiritual father work wonders like Moses, wielding the power of a god. He knows the choreography, but now he embellishes the act according to the character of his own spirit. Elisha strikes the waters of the Jordan with the cloak and cries out, “Ayeh Adonai Elohei Eliyahu – Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah?” He does not say, “Where is my God?” Or, “Where is our God?” He says, “Where is the God of Elijah?” He reminds God what God has just done, essentially asking, “Where is the one my father served, the one who took my father from me.” I see my grandmother throwing up her hands in frustration and grief shouting, “Lord!”

A tiny segue: As Bible Study participants know, I see the opening chapters of Genesis as a kind of key for reading the entirety of the Bible, the whole plan of salvation foreshadowed in miniature. In Genesis 3, after the fall of humankind, God wanders in the Garden like one lost, crying out for Adam, “Ayeka?! Where are you? What have you done?” God lifts up an aye-ka, like Elisha’s aye-h, God asks “where are you” like Elisha asks “where is God now?” In response to God, Adam and Eve offer excuses and transfer blame for their transgression, motivated by their naked shame to bend and twist the truth. But perhaps Elisha has always known that he was naked before God, that there would be no point in hiding his truth from the Holy One. He comes before God with everything he has, honest and real, and demands Presence. God cries out to humanity, “Where are you?” And humanity, in Elisha, shouts back, “No, Lord, where are you?”

There is a Yiddish saying I learned recently that I quite like:

דײַן מזל, גאָט, וואָס דו וווינסט אַזוי הויך
אַניט וואָלט מען דיר די פֿענצטער אויסגעזעצט

“Dayn mazl, Got, vos du voynst azoy hoykh; anit volt men dir di fentster oysgezetst. You’re lucky, God, that you live so high; otherwise people would break your windows.” As my grandmother would say, that’s a bit “fresh.” But sometimes I wonder if what God would like most from us is a broken window. At least it shows that someone is paying attention.

Sitting here today, you may feel that there are some rocks you wouldn’t mind throwing at God’s windows, some mantles you’d like to slap against the river Jordan. So here’s your invitation: Do it! Get loud, be honest, God knows how you’re feeling anyway, because you are naked. It may feel weird or scary to imagine praying this way, but perhaps God is waiting for you to bring that kind of vulnerability into your spiritual life, to acknowledge without shame who you really are and how you really feel.

And this is how this kind of prayer works: In the bold and honest expression of our most difficult feelings, we connect with our real need for God, and find that God is also seeking us. This endeavor sometimes requires the solitude of a prayer closet, and other times the safety of beloved community. Our frustrated prayers are answered, not because we sufficiently grovel before the King of the Universe, but because we are real and honest before our Maker, and this plugs us back into the only reality where we can do the work that God has given us to do. Here, in the real world the real God made, we seek the Presence of God, and God is with us in our loss and suffering, our sickness and political turmoil, seeking to dwell in our hearts.

When we cry out, when we break ourselves open before God, then we make room for God to enter in. Hiding in the religious fantasy of a future beatific vision brings consolation, but little else. Attending church religiously in exchange for heaven while your neighbors suffer hunger, fear, and oppression, will not only fail to pay the entry fee, it will blind you to the heaven that is possible here on earth. Being a Christian has nothing to do with viewing righteous pageantry, even though I love pageantry very very much. True Christianity is a path of return to our total divine humanity, only possible in the context of an honest interior life.

So, back to Elisha – his prayer does not offend God, but rather brings Elisha into right relationship, not only with God, but also the world around him. It connects him with the power of God; he receives the double portion of Elijah’s spirit, not in spite of his raw display of anger, but because of it. We may think we know what happens when prophets lash out. We know that Moses was barred from entering the Holy Land for striking the rock at Meribah. We anticipate, perhaps, the outpouring of God’s wrath on a cheeky prophet, no longer restrained by his late mentor. But no, instead we bear witness to the undeniable sign of divine favor as the waters part at Elisha’s command, he crosses back over Jordan into the Promised Land, and the other prophets recognize him as the successor to their master. Far from incurring judgment, Elisha’s confrontation with God brings empowerment.

How could it be that God tolerates such behavior? What I want to tell you today is that God invites it, our God has been waiting for a long time for us to emulate just this kind of chutzpah.

In the Gospel today we hear that Jesus is approached by a would-be believer who echoes the words of Ruth and Elisha, “I will follow wherever you go.” But Jesus has a really excellent B.S. detector; he knows when our prayers are not honest. Jesus responds, “Birds have their nests…but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

We assume that when Jesus says “Son of Man,” he means himself. He is the Son of Man, as he is the Son of God, these two titles holding open the mystery of the Incarnation. But son of man also means “human being,” and it can refer to any human person. The Living God has nowhere to lay his head, and he desperately seeks after the love of his creations, entering into our world in a scandalous act of self exposure, self emptying, to save us and love us. And humankind has no place to rest in this world when we attempt this ephemeral transit without Christ, that is, without truth. We must hear God’s call to us, “Ayeka, Where are you?” And we must take time in solitude and time together to yearn for God, saying, “Lord! Where are you?”

“Courage is fear that has said its prayers,” but there is a certain kind of prayer that our fears and anger and grief need in order to yield the lifegiving substance that is courage. It is true prayer, if I may be so bold, which is daring and honest prayer, that invites God’s presence through the breaking open of the human heart. I learned this prayer from my grandmother, and I hear it in the prayer of a devastated disciple at the loss of his beloved teacher. I hear it in the prayer of a child who has lost her parents to bombings, politically induced starvation, or inhumane capture and removal.

Where is this God? We will sit on the dry riverbed of Jordan in the midst of mighty waters and, if we cry out boldly, honestly, truthfully, then God will be present there. I don’t know if we will get what we think we want when we pray this way, but we will get what we need. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head but in our hearts and we in his. So let us cry out to him in the truth of our fear and frustration, and there we will see how he answers – through our empowerment and action. Amen.