Proper 28 A November 13, 2011
1 Kings 19:1-18 St. Alban’s, Austin
I have to tell you that I am a bit frustrated as we navigate the narrative lectionary. These are such incredibly great and interesting stories that I want to just sit down on the altar steps and tell them in their entirety.
I want to tell you everything I know about Elijah. I want to talk about what an amazing person he was, how he appeared, a mysterious man called by God to stand up to the prophets of Baal and to the bad king Ahab and his murderous wife Jezebel, but then I’d need to go back and tell you how the kingdom of Israel got divided in two after King Solomon died without a designated heir and his two sons Rehoboam and Jeroboam went their separate ways and in the south only two tribes maintained worship at Jerusalem at the temple while in the north ten tribes went back to worship at the high places and all the sneaky little idols and foreign gods wrangled their way in. So much for worshiping only Yahweh.
Instead of making a long story short, I’d much rather make a short story long, weave it with all the rich details. Wonder about character and motivation. Imagine what might be going on in the gaps – that’s called midrash, embroidery. Let the different stories intertwine and probably end up confusing you to bits. That’s what I want to do, but I won’t.
We’re going to be reading from the prophets for a number of weeks now, and I wonder how much we know about prophets. What we know as the Old Testament is the whole of the Bible for our Jewish friends. They have a different name for it. They call it Tanakh. It’s a book with three parts. T is for Torah, the law, or the Book of Moses, which is comprised of the first five books: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. The second part is called Nevi’im, or the prophets. That’s how important they consider these unusual people. And the last part is called the Ketuvim, the writings, and includes the psalms, proverbs, and other books.
We probably think of prophets as fortune tellers, but that is an over-simplification. Rather they occupy a very particular era of Jewish history and fulfill a specific function. The era of the prophets began, as I said, with the death of Solomon and the division of the promised land into two kingdoms. These kingdoms were doomed from the get-go. They were headed down the very wrongest roads led by mostly very poor leaders. Fearful leaders. Egocentric leaders. But God kept trying to set them straight.
God appointed prophets to be God’s mouthpieces, to get the people’s attention through being outrageous in their dress and their behavior in order to shake the people out of their misdirection and wake up the kings to doing God’s will. All this began in the 10th century BCE and pretty much ended with the exile in Babylon in the sixth.
Elijah was a prophet of the northern kingdom. He lived during the reign of King Ahab, who died in 850 BCE. Elijah’s job was to bring Israel back to God, but Ahab would hear none of it. Ahab married the daughter of the king of Tyre, Jezebel, and, well, we know what the name Jezebel means. Bad to the core. She brought her gods with her, the Baals, fertility gods, and right away there was a showdown. During a drought there was a competition between the prophets of Baal and Elijah, the prophet of the Lord. Elijah won hands down and the prophets of Baal were slaughtered. Jezebel was not pleased. She put out a hit on Elijah and he ran to the cave to hide from her hit men.
This is where we find Elijah in our reading. Quivering in a cave on the same mountain where Moses received the law. Don’t let that detail escape you.
And don’t let the detail that we are nearing the end of our pledge drive escape you either. This is an important time for our parish. Not because of a budget. We will have a budget. Some years it is fatter than other years. But no matter where it ends up, we will do important ministry, life-giving ministry, life-changing ministry, transforming ministry with whatever we are given by the action of God’s love in your hearts.
This unsettling feeling is God working in us, maybe making us feel just a little off balance because God wants us to step out in faith, to try something that is not altogether comfortable so that we can grow closer to God, so that we can grow in our ministry, so that we can become more confident in claiming and using the gifts God has given us. It’s as if God is giving us the nudge to step out on the high dive board and saying, “Hey, you can do it. You can do it because I am here with you.” I have to tell you that I basically am gutless. I would never, ever dare to step up here to the pulpit thinking I had anything worthwhile to say to you on behalf of who – God? – if I thought I were stepping up here alone.
God is not happy to find Elijah in the cave. Shoot, God just sent down fire from heaven to help Elijah triumph over the prophets of Baal, and Elijah demonstrates his faith by hiding out from Jezebel’s goons? By waiting to die? Hey, Elijah. Do you remember who’s got your back?
But God is pretty gentle. He’s essentially telling Elijah to get over himself, but he has compassion for Elijah’s fear, and so he tells Elijah to prepare for a theophany. A theophany is an appearance of the Lord. So Elijah sits waiting. And there is a great wind, and all the leaves get blown of the trees and debris is flying everywhere, but it is not God. And then the earth starts to shake under Elijah’s feet and there is nothing to hang onto and rocks are rolling down the mountain cracking trees, but it is just an earthquake, not God. And then fire, singeing everything, choking the air with smoke, but it is not God. And then there is an intense stillness, a dense silence, a presence and a motionlessness, a centeredness, and that is where God is.
A small still voice.
Have you not heard it? In the moment you felt most alone? In the moment you felt most vulnerable? God’s gentleness, God’s strength, all in one moment. Certainty. You are not alone. It’s not about your power. It is God’s. Of course you are not enough. God is. With God, each and every one of us is more than enough.
What is church about?
I saw a video about a church in which the pastor built a huge parking lot, and his goal was to have that parking lot filled up fifty-two Sundays a year, and to have every seat in church crammed elbow to elbow, and do you know how he did it? He taped a check for a thousand dollars to the bottom of one chair each week, and at the end of worship people turned their chairs upside down to see if they got the thousand bucks. If they did, do you think they came back? And if they didn't? And do you really think they were thinking about God during the service, I mean other than praying that the dough was on the bottom of their chair?
No, what is church about? Maybe getting a door prize? Or is it about making us feel guilty? Gosh, I hope not. Is it about making us feel superior to the people who don’t go to church? I hope not that, too. Is it about helping us to know that our lives have meaning? That we have been given gifts by God that God needs us to use for God’s people? I think that’s it.
That God needs us to get out of our caves, to stop feeling as if we are inadequate because the Jezebels of the world are always going to be going after us’ God wants us to know that we are not our own best line of defense. Nor are we our own best source of power. Whatever it is that we are to do, whatever it is that is our calling, our vocation, our mission, we are not left to our own devices to implement it.
No. As God shows Elijah in the confrontation, the blessing, the commissioning, the embracing at that cave, God is always ahead of us, preparing the way, inviting us into a future we are inadequate to imagine and too insecure to embrace on our own, leading us as if with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night into nothing less than God’s own promised land and God’s own kingdom on earth.
But just as God essentially kicked Elijah’s backside to get him out of that gol-darned cave and back into the world to consecrate kings, God needs us to trust that he’s got our back, that he’s got better ideas for us than we do for ourselves, and that he needs us to step out into the gap and trust that he will take us where he needs us to go. Where we need to go individually and where we need to go as a parish.
It’s not easy, not for me, not for you. But a cave is no place for God’s beloved, God’s appointed.
We’re out on the high wire, but we’re never, ever, out here alone. We have been given gifts. Different gifts. Different quantities of gifts. But they are not to be hidden in caves. They are not to be handled with fear. They are to be shared and celebrated. And we are called to step forth in faith, to participate in the joy of our abundantly creative God and to offer freely and with gratitude from the gifts we have been given what we have to offer to nothing less than the kingdom of God.
Amen.
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