II
Kings 6:1-7
Elisha was apparently associated
with several miracles. Those that
involve healing or the deliverance of a nation from invasion we can
appreciate. The one that we have heard
about this morning, where he made an ax head float, is just weird. At best it sounds like some sort of magic
trick. There’s more to it, though, and
to get at that I want to tell another story.
My Aunt Dot worked for the town of Tonawanda, NY for
many years. I am not entirely sure what
all she did, but I do know that it involved typing. It must have involved a lot of typing,
because she developed carpal tunnel syndrome from it. Many years after she retired, she was typing
away on a computer keyboard and drinking an orange soda, two activities that
don’t always go well together. First,
she spilled the soda onto the keyboard.
Then she grabbed some paper towels and began running them over the keys
to soak things up. Do you know what can
happen if you just press on random keys?
It occurred to her that she should maybe unplug it after that, which was
a good move considering that the next thing she did was to keep the whole thing
from getting sticky was to take a wet dishrag and wipe it all down. She let it dry but it still felt sticky, so
she sprayed everything again with windex before she plugged it in again, only
to find that the screen was filled with funny lines and the machine was making
odd noises.
She was not dumb. Everything that she did would have made
sense if she had been using a manual typewriter, or even an electric typewriter
– and, yes, there were luxurious IBM Selectric models whose use overlapped with
current technology. My aunt, whose mind
was at the start of what would eventually become a profound forgetfulness, had
simply begun to revert to the more familiar side of the technological divide
that she had lived through.
The story of Elisha and the floating
ax head is hard for us to appreciate fully because it comes to us from a time
of even deeper transition. The situation
involves woodcutting, not typing.
“When they came to the Jordan,
when they came to the Jordan, they cut down trees. But as one was felling a log, his ax head
fell into the water.” [II Kings 6:4-5a]
So far, it’s
pretty normal. Anyone who has used an
axe knows that they break. That’s one of
those things they taught us in Boy Scouts; never stand near someone using an
axe or a hatchet in case the head flies off or the haft, the handle,
breaks. Listen to the woodcutter’s response,
though, when that happened here, and the ax head flew into the river.
“He cried out, ‘Alas, master! It was borrowed.’” [II Kings 6:5b]
Maybe you’ve had
to borrow a chainsaw. When was the last
time you had to borrow an ax? It’s one
of the basic tools of survival. If you
were going to build yourself a cabin, it’s one of those things that you would
be sure to keep on hand. The fact that this
one was borrowed is a reminder that, as one commentary puts it,
“Whereas axes were relatively
inexpensive in modern times, they were not so in ancient Israel, where iron was
scarce and, in time of war, largely reserved for military use.”[1]
It wasn’t just
that iron ore was scarce. In the same
way that national security leads us to restrict the sharing of certain types of
technology, the ability to smelt iron was not general and, in some cases, was
controlled knowledge. A few generations
earlier, according to the First Book of Samuel,
“there was no smith to be found
throughout all the land of Israel; for the Philistines had said, ‘The Hebrews
must not make swords or spears for themselves.’” [I Samuel 13:19]
We are right here
at the end of the Bronze Age. Iron is
cutting edge technology.
A
lost ax head is equivalent to having a company’s entire IT system go down. Since the ax was borrowed, it wasn’t just the
user who would feel the loss, but the owner as well, and anyone else who might
have benefitted from the blade later on.
That’s how these things work. The
summer after I graduated from high school I worked on data entry in the
financial aid office at Swarthmore College.
One day a question that I did not quite understand appeared on my screen
and since it was a yes-or-no question I figured I had a 50-50 chance and pressed
the button for “yes”. Then the screen
froze. It stayed frozen until the end of
the day, when my boss came in holding a pile of paper about two feet
thick. “This,” she said, “is a print-out
of the entire financial aid package for every student in the school.” At that time, they were working on a
mainframe and there was one printer for the whole system. They would call you when your work was done
and you could pick it up, which is what she had done. For most of the day this had been the only
document printed on campus, while all the other jobs had waited in line behind
it.
We
laugh about this stuff. We get a chuckle
when Grandpa puts his milk in the icebox. But not all the effects of changing
technology are benign or trivial. Not
all have to do with getting used to new programs or gadgets or terminology.
What
happens to people when a new technology is out of reach, like an ax head that
is underwater? Huge social changes come
about because of what might be called (at least later on) technical
progress. Some of those changes may be
painful to live through and there are people who are just not up to it. When an old industry slows down or dies out,
not everyone can simply move smoothly into another field. Some are too old and by the time they
retrain, no one wants to hire them, or they have financial obligations that
they cannot meet on an entry-level wage.
Some do not have the ability to learn whatever the up-and-coming fields
require. Some who would move with the
job market are limited by obligations to family. Others who might be able to overcome all of
this face a degree of depression and anxiety too great for them.
You
see some people give up. Look where you
find the greatest trafficking in illegal drugs and you can pretty much track
where the changes of our own day have upset the earlier patterns without
replacing them with others. If people
are shooting up in abandoned factories and vacant houses, maybe those buildings
themselves bear witness to the connection between a lack of meaningful opportunity
and drug use. There are almost
stereotypical images that link rural poverty to the establishment of meth
labs. One report from the National
Institutes of Health states the obvious:
“In Central Appalachia, focus groups have
identified economic disparity, unemployment, and under-education as
characteristics that may increase both substance use and treatment failure.”[2]
In other words, when the
ax head sinks into the mud, everything else goes along. Without the tools, you cannot get the work
done.
That’s why it’s imperative not to lose sight of the way
that God, through Elisha, made a piece of iron float back up from the bottom of
the Jordan river. That’s the same river
where Naaman’s deadly leprosy was cured.
It’s the same river where Jesus would be baptized and the Holy Spirit
would settle on him like a dove. At the
direction of Elisha, the man of God, the iron ax blade floated back up to the
surface.
“He said, ‘Pick it up.’ So he reached out
his hand and took it.”
[II Kings 6:7]
More is happening here
than a veiled promise that if you just give everything enough time it will all
work out. That is just not true. There have been many places and many
societies and many people who have not been able to steer through times of
profound change. Some have
collapsed. But the same report I just
read from about conditions in Central Appalachia goes on almost immediately to
say this:
“Characteristics such as strong faith in
God, strong family ties, strong sense of pride, and valuing self-sufficiency,
on the other hand, may act as preventative factors and help to bolster
treatment effectiveness in the region.”
I love it that the
first characteristic it identifies as a source of hope, even for people who
have gone under in some way, is “strong faith in God”.
Change is going to happen. We are not still living in the Bronze
Age. We don’t just use iron to cut
lumber to build homes. We use steel itself
as the framework for skyscrapers and barns alike. God does not put technological change on hold
for us, but does help us negotiate the difficulties that come with it. Not all change is good, but faith helps us to
evaluate the good and the bad, that we may choose wisely and, when there are
unintended consequences, respond with compassion and care to the people who get
left out or get caught in the middle, because there are a lot of them around.
Over in Mont Clare on Canal Day last
month, I read the history of the old Lock Keeper’s house that sits back behind
St. Michael’s playground. It was built
at a time when the Schuylkill Canal was busy.
Someone had to be on call twenty-four hours a day to maintain and run
the lock, and sometimes to deal with problems among the barge workers who came
through. Eventually, though, the freight
traffic shifted to the railroads, and later to trucking, and the canal closed down. But no one forced the last lock-keeper, or
his sister and nephew who lived with him, to leave the house that was their
home. Change came, but caring was
already there, and because of the caring, change brought hardship but not
catastrophe.
[1]
Choon-Leong Seow in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. III (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1999), 199.
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