Scriptures: I Kings 19:1-13 & John 14:23-29
08/12/18
Elijah has a problem. Elijah, a prophet of God, perhaps on of the greatest prophets of God in the Jewish tradition, literally running for his life from a hostile army. And he is running, we are told, because immediately before this accounting of Elijah running for his life, that Elijah had just, with the help of God, made the king and queen of Israel look like fools. The scripture tells us that Israel had fallen under the rule of a ruler who was hostile to God and the ways of God. This ruler, Ahab, sought instead to worship the Baals, that is the false gods in Israel. At the same time, Israel had been suffering a drought for three years, that is three years in which the sky refused to allow one drop of rain to touch the parched Israelite fields, three years since a crop was able to be grown, three years since food had been produced in Israel and it is not hard to imagine that if you take away water, food, and their ability to take care of themselves that frustration and anger and disillusionment and despair are going to quickly follow, and this situation is no different, tensions in the country were running high. And again it seems that many in Israel were doing what anyone of us would do during those times when it feels that perhaps God has abandoned us. They began to look for other things to put in the place of God. Things that were tangible, things that were visible. Who knew if worshipping the Baals was helping but at least in them you could sit or kneel before an object and see it and touch it; but even while worshipping the Baals, even while looking upon them and touching them, the rains did not come and the people grew increasingly tense as the crops did not produce and the food in their storage bins continued to be depleted and eventually the Israelites were just trying to survive.
In the midst of these tense times, Elijah sought an audience with the king. And Elijah, offered words of rebuke, saying to Ahab, “you have forgotten the ways of God, you have stopped following God and instead have followed the Baals.” And to prove to the king the falsity of their gods Elijah challenged Ahab to have all the prophets of the Baals meet him on the top of Mount Carmel where two altars had been set up. One was for the gods of the prophets and the other for the God of Abraham and Sarah. And so it was that Elijah and all of Israel gathered on the mountain. And the scripture tells us that, following a day of prayer to the false gods of the king’s prophets, a day of summoning the mighty power of the baals, a day of withering heat in which the 450 prophets of Baal gave all they had in an effort to entreat the gods to bring fire down from heaven to consume the ram on the altar, nothing had happened. And when they had given up, we are told that Elijah simply offered up a brief prayer to God, as a column of fire poured down from the sky and consumed both of the altars. God had been shown to be God, and the prophets of Baal had been shown to be false. And Elijah, turned to the crowd that had gathered there and said to them, go back and prepare, the rains are a’coming and all the peoples returned to their worship of God and if that were the end of the story, everything would have ended well. But, as you might imagine, King Ahab, did not like being made to look like a fool, having spent all this time worshipping a false God, having had his whole country turn away from the gods that he worshipped and return to worshipping the God of their ancestors made him appear a hollow ruler. The king had been shown to be wearing no clothes and now everyone could see it. And so, in response to this challenge to his authority, he immediately sent his army to try to do away with Elijah. And this is where the story for today picks up.
As my Wednesday night bible study class will tell you, women are rarely actually given names in the Bible and often it is for displaying significantly bad character traits. Think about it, there’s Eve, who is always presented as naked but for strategically placed fig leaves and holding an apple with a large bite taken out of it. You have Delilah who has become a symbol for all foul temptresses everywhere, and you have Jezebel, whom we encounter in our story for today. Jezebel, a name that has become synonymous in contemporary language with ruthlessness and cunning, first appears in the story of Ahab and Elijah as both the one responsible for the King’s turning away from God and towards the Baals but also the primary driving force behind the King’s bloodlust towards Elijah. And it is her words that fill Elijah with fear and set him running from the King’s armies. And Elijah runs as fast as he can for as far as he can until he cannot go one step further and you can almost see him collapsing to the ground as he pleads with God to end his life. “Take my life,” he says, “because that is preferable to the end that the King and his wife have waiting for me when I am captured.” But, instead, he is ministered to, twice by an angel of God, that he might have strength for the journey to Mount Horeb, the place of God. And we are told that, once there, Elijah crawls into a cave in the mountain and he waits. And we are told he waits until he hears the movement of the wind outside the cave. Quiet at first but building, the way you can hear wind rustling pine trees and mighty oak on a cool fall morning. That sound of leaves rubbing against one another, of dead pine needles releasing from their branches and onto the ground. We know what that kind of wind sounds like and as Elijah stands at the mouth of the cave, he hears the wind growing stronger and stronger until all around him trees are falling and boulders being blown down the hill and he is sure this is God coming to me but God was not in the wind. Dejected and somewhat surprised Elijah returns to the cave to wait. And then a rumble, the pebbles in the cave begin to twitch back and forth before and then roll away and then the whole of the earth starts to violently shake under his feet perhaps knocking Elijah over and as he gets up once again and makes it out of the cave sure that he will now have an audience with God as the tremors start to dissipate and he is able to survey the damage done by the earthquake he is once again despondent. God was not in the earthquake. Elijah returns to the cave beginning to wonder if God is even coming at all, until, the crackle of fire, like the popping of embers in a fireplace that you can see on a cold winter’s night as the little sparks hit the screen, that’s the sound that begins to fill Elijah’s ears. And then comes the heat as the whole outside of the cave becomes consumed by a torrential fire that burns hotter and brighter than any fire he has ever seen and surely now God will come to Elijah, but God was not in the fire, but after everything has been blown away, after all the rocks and the rubble have been sent tumbling down the mountain, after everything around him has been burn away, we are told that Elijah hears the “sheer sound of silence.” And I love that word, “sheer,” as if to denote that this is an ear piercing silence, the kind of silence you can only imagine; the kind of silence where all the actions of the world, all the movement of the world, all the hustle and bustle and running around and children crying and music playing, and television blaring, and cellphones buzzing and washing machines running and ceiling fans spinning and air conditioners blowing and candles crackling, stops. And there was the spirit of God. One of my favorite times in the life of the church is Monday afternoons at 1:00. Because after the church’s prayer group has lifted up our voices with those things that are going on in the life of the church, after we have named each person who is joyful or struggling, after we have communally said a prayer to God, Shirley Narkates leads us into breathing, into centering, into silence because Shirley knows, the whole of the group knows that it is in the silence that hope, that peace, that love is found. It is in the silence that God is found. And so it is, in the sheer silence of the moment, after everything else has been cleared away that Elijah can finally hear the voice of God. And following the threats against the life of Elijah, following the running for his life, following his exhausted collapse and begging to lose his life in peace rather than in violence, following the 40 day and 40 night journey to Horeb, following the wind and the earthquake and the fire, following all that, is the whisper of God. “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
It is one of the more telling developments in the history of linguistics that in both the Hebrew and Greek language, the word for “spirit” is the same word for “breath” and “wind.” In Hebrew, ruach. In Greek, pneuma. What does it say about the way in which those earliest members of the Jewish and Christian faith conceived of the movement of God, and what does it say about the way in which we are to understand the presence of God, the part of God that drives us back towards reconciliation with the Divine, in our own lives? What does it say when the opening stanza of the Bible tells us, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind, a ruach, a spirit from God swept over the face of the waters.” What does it say when Jesus tells Nicodemus in the darkness that the wind blows where it will and so to does the pneuma, the spirit? What does it say when Jesus, soon after telling his disciples about his impending death, tells them, “but don’t worry, after I am gone, you will know one who will advocate for you, a spirit of truth.”
I suppose, perhaps, the disciples in our second reading for the morning are feeling a little overwhelmed as Jesus is speaking to them. They, who had given up their lives and their livelihoods to follow Jesus have just been told that Jesus is going to eventually die at the hands of the oppressive rulers of his day. Rulers that cannot stand to have anyone question their divine right to rule over the land that they are now occupying. And Jesus has never shied away from that charge and so with that boldness and let’s be honest, at times, brashness, comes the constant threat of violent death. And so as he speaks them, Jesus is aware of their concern. Aware of their fear. “Jesus, how will we make it once you are gone?” they must have all been thinking. And so he reminds them again, the only thing that is of any importance in this life is love. Share the love of God from which you were conceived and to which you will return. Share the love of God that flows through all the world, constantly reconciling, constantly redeeming, every moment of everyday. Share the love of God that renders powerless all the struggles of this life, all the oppression of the occupying forces and the inhumanity that we each too often show towards one another. Share the love of God both with one another but more importantly with everyone you meet, everyone you encounter. And once again, the wind, the spirit, the ruach, the pneuma, blew through the place in which they found themselves and Jesus’s words rang out once more. “Peace I leave you. My peace I give to you.”
Often I think it is easier to turn away from the struggles of this life and seek the false security of apathy than it is to peer headlong into the things that plague our world. I think it is easier to want to reach for the comfort of the things that distract us from the messy, broken, heartbreaking, things that go on within creation. Some of the things arise from natural causes, earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, violent winds. And it is difficult to see God in those times. Elijah struggled out of the cave three times desperate to see God in the raging machinations of the world unfolding before him. He wanted more than anything to know that God’s presence still dwelt within creation and so he drug himself out time and time again but it was not until everything else had fallen away that God became visible to him. Some of our struggles arise simply because we are brothers and sisters who do horrible, terrible things to one another in an effort to gain our own security on the backs of others. So it was that the disciples faced this when the Roman occupiers decided it was time to end the life of that troublemaker Jesus. And they couldn’t make sense of it until they had sensed the movement of the Holy Spirit in their lives once again. “Peace I leave you. My peace I give to you.” So we arrive here at this place. And church is so often the intersection between the brokenness of the world between the gritty messy unpleasantness of the world and the peace of God experienced in the silence of prayer, experienced in the silence of silence, experienced in the movement of the Spirit over this chaos and bringing order out of it. We are the home of those with no other home. We are the place where people come when they need to collapse in the cave and wait for the spirit of God to pass over again. We are the place that flings our doors open every week and says all who enter this place are welcome and loved and cherished and we will stand with you, wherever you are and hold you up and carry you and take care of you and nurse you back to health and help you see the movement of God not just in your life but in the world. We are the place where those who can’t find another place to go come and find community and security and love. We can’t turn away from the messiness of the world, from the hate and violence and struggles. We are called to be at the intersection of all that and God. And it’s not easy. It’s not easy to stand at that intersection, to hold all of the brokenness of the world together like sand that slowly sifts through the cracks and crevices of our hands, to hold together the crumbling edifices of the city of man, to see the shattered dreams and visions of those who are closest to us, and to know that our job tomorrow is to help them dream new dreams and have new visions with the slivers that are left. And that’s the call of the church, to lift up all those in our midst, to help them walk the next step in the journey, but also to reach out into the whole of God’s beautiful and broken world. To be about the work of bringing the world and all its inhabitants closer together with each moment. To stop the cycles of hatred, of violence, of despair that have spun for thousands of years and replace them with love, with peace, with hope. For it is only then that we will continue the work initiated by Christ, the work done by Peter, James, and John, the work done by Paul and Silas, the work done by Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin, the work done by Teresa of Avila and Hildegard of Bingen, the work done by Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, the work that now comes to us, to bring sight to the blind and release to the captives, good news to the poor, and freedom for all who are oppressed, we get to declare the year of God’s favor for all people and we get to do so in Jesus’s name and while these tasks are rarely easy, they are never not a blessing. We are a blessed people. Blessed from the moment we are born, blessed to be a witness to the light that is never overcome by the darkness, blessed to be a blessing. Thanks be to God for all the blessings of this life and glory to God in the highest and peace, amongst all God’s peoples, alleluia, amen.
*-Artwork is Elijah in the Desert by Washington Allston, hanging in the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, MA, taken from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Washington_Allston_-_Elijah_in_the_Desert_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg