Little prophet-mockers

 Little prophet-mockers 

I asked Roz if she would get in touch with the Narrow Man and ask him about the story at the end of the second chapter of II Kings, the story about Elisha and the boys that teased him about being bald, and he cursed them, and two she-bears came out of the scrub and tore 42 of the boys apart.
     She was reluctant to do it because she didn’t want to tempt him out of retirement, she said. (You may recall we went last Sunday to hear his “valedictory sermon” at Sluggish Fan Presbyterian Church.) I said I wouldn’t tell anyone where I got my information if it ever came up. Besides, why would it?
     “Why would what come up?”
     “The story of Elisha and the bears.”
     She said I had missed the point. I didn’t deny that, but I persisted as the sons of the prophets persisted when they wanted to go look for Elijah even though he was gone. (II Kings 2:15-18, part of the Narrow Man’s sermon); and like Elisha, she finally assented. She said, “Okay,” since they were friends. And I said, “Good,” though I missed the point of that, too.

She emailed him my interest. And he emailed back that it was an interesting story, partly because it raised questions that no one really knew the answers to, or if they did either they didn’t want to reveal them or they were wrong.
     He had a seminary classmate, he wrote, that when he was called to preach in various churches around and about, as seminary students were when churches were desperate, he (Tom) always told this story as his “children’s lesson,” concluding: “If you have any questions, ask your parents after church.” Tom, the Narrow Man, wrote, was not being mean! He just had a strong belief in theological modesty: It was good to learn early that none of us had all the answers. Or some of the answers we did have weren’t good ones.

Then, the Narrow Man did in his email what he always did in his sermons. He retold the story, how Elisha goes up from Jericho to Bethel, and as he is arriving, these small boys come out and jeer at him because he is bald. And this so offends him, though what is wrong with being bald is not entirely clear — doesn’t Leviticus say somewhere something like “Now, if a man loses his hair, he is bald; but he is still clean,” meaning not leprous, not to be cast out: he is just bald. But Elisha is so offended that he curses the boys in the name of the Lord. Then the bears come out of the woods and tear the little mockers apart.

The Narrow Man

Then, he went on, the Narrow Man in his email, that as someone as bald as Elisha, he didn’t think that was what the story was about. It had instead to do with righteousness, of the self variety, which always contains within it the seeds of violence.
     Something happens when we come to believe that our God is our God. In this case, somewhere between Jericho and Bethel, Elisha seems to have come to the belief that any insult to him, the prophet of God, is an insult to God himself. He wouldn’t name names, tNM said, but he had known preachers like that: an attack on them is an attack on the church is an attack on God, God’s very self. Damn the attackers.
     Actually, he had known just folks that had fallen into the same trap. An attack on their righteous rightness is an attack on their God. Damn the attackers. Full speed ahead. Run right over the mockers.

I should say that this is what I heard because Roz didn’t read the email, she told it to me. “Did you say you wouldn’t say where it came from?” she wanted to know, I am not sure why.
     “Where what came from?” I said.
                                                                07.03.22