23 June 2013
Ashland Presbyterian Church
1 Kings 19:1-16
Listen to the Silence
One of my favorite
books of all time is Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit
451. In this world of the
not-so-distant future where firemen are employed for burning books instead of
putting out fires, one fireman, Guy Montag, finds himself enthralled by
the books he’s supposed to burn.
Possibly my
favorite scene in the novel occurs as Montag is on his way, via futuristic
subway train, to the home of an eccentric secret book collector, Faber, to show him
his latest find. On the ride
Montag, convinced he’ll have to give up his find (which happens to be a Bible),
sets out to try to memorize the book, or as much as possible, before the book
is taken from him. His efforts to
commit “consider the lilies of the field” to memory, however, are continually
thwarted by the train’s sound system, blaring a particularly nonsensical and
annoying ad for toothpaste. Montag
is finally driven to an eruption of frustration, screaming “Lilies!” at the
speaker system to the amazement of the shocked and frightened passengers on the
train.
Later, at Faber’s,
he shows the curious old man the Bible, and after running his fingers longingly
over the book and reading through several passages, Faber finally asks Montag,
“why are you doing this?” At his
wit’s end and not even understanding himself, Montag finally answers, “Nobody listens anymore.”
Failure to listen,
or perhaps inability to listen, is hardly limited to media-distracted
characters in futuristic novels.
Our own scriptures are full of examples of individuals who don’t seem to
be able to hear what God or any human being is trying to tell them. Jesus frequently is driven to cry out
“Anyone who has ears, listen!” to his sometimes-distracted and confused
audiences. The story of Jonah
features a character who hears God’s
command to preach to the city of Nineveh all too clearly, but is rabidly
unwilling to listen to that
call. And in today’s scripture,
inability (or unwillingness? It’s
hard to tell sometimes) – the failure to listen,
as opposed to simply hearing – befalls one of the great heroes of the Old
Testament, the prophet Elijah.
By any account it
would seem Elijah is on a serious winning streak. He prophesies a drought in Israel – to the face of King
Ahab, no less – and a drought settles in over the land. He performs a miracle to provide a
widow and her son an endless supply of meal and oil, and raises the son from
the dead to boot. He wins a
spectacular contest against four hundred and fifty prophets of the foreign idol
Baal, calling down fire from heaven to consume an offering where the Baal
prophets had failed. He decrees
the end of the drought, and rain returns to the land.
Yet one little
threat from the queen, the devious importer of deities Jezebel, and Elijah
becomes unhinged. The prophet who
had performed such deeds of power is reduced to a scared little boy, running
away in the face of a threat.
He runs away all
the way to the mountain called Horeb, better known in Israelite history as
Sinai. He runs all the way to the
mountain of God, legendary in Israelite history as the mountain where Moses
communed with God and received the Law.
At this point I’d
be better served by sitting down for a moment and playing the appropriate
section from Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah. The rushing mighty wind, the earthquake,
the fire; all of these were tokens of the past, of God’s encounters with Moses
on this very same mountain. Yet
this time, the text is at pains to tell us, the Lord was not in the wind, the earthquake, the fire.
What follows next
is most commonly known as a “still small voice,” as translated in the King
James Version of the scriptures.
The Hebrew words are not that easy to translate; it could be a “sheer
silence,” as the NRSV says, or it could also be translated as “the sound of a
breath,” or a Simon & Garfunkel fan could even get away with translating it
as a “sound of silence.” Whatever
it was, it was so arresting, so striking, so different from the display just before that Elijah was drawn from
his hiding place, out onto the side of the mountain itself, where God asks
Elijah a question that God has already asked once, a question that has as much
of accusation about it as inquiry:
“What are you doing here,
Elijah?”
Somehow, after
that magnificent, awesome, display, after the wind and earthquake and fire and
then the silent sound that somehow revealed God in ways the wind and earthquake
and fire did not, after the tumultuous events that brought Elijah to the very
mountain where Moses stood before God and received the Law; after all of this,
somehow, some way, Elijah Did. Not. Get It.
He parrots back
the same answer he gave the first time God asked the question: “I
have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have
forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with
the sword. I alone am left, and
they are seeking my life, to take it away.”
Certainly a very
pious-sounding answer. Sounds a
little like the psalmist in today’s reading, demanding that the Lord “Vindicate me … and defend my cause”
and questioning why he was abandoned.
But perhaps we ought to retrace Elijah’s steps, his activity since first
appearing in the seventeenth chapter of 1 Kings. Is Elijah’s complaint valid, or is it possible that Elijah
was missing something?
We first encounter
Elijah proclaiming to King Ahab that a drought was about to settle upon the
land. Immediately God provides a
hiding place for Elijah, with water to drink and ravens to bring him food. When the water dries up God sends Elijah
to the home of a widow, where the last bits of meal and oil miraculously
persevere and provide for the widow and her son, and where Elijah performs the
miracle of raising that son from the dead. Next Elijah again confronts Ahab, in the contest with the
prophets of Baal; Elijah calls down fire from heaven to consume an offering,
and has the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal killed. This act brings about the threat from
Jezebel that sends Elijah on the run.
But first, Elijah announces the end of the drought; with the Baal
prophets vanquished and the people repentant, the rain is on the way, says the
prophet. And one last detail; as
Ahab returns, 18:46 tells us that Elijah ran all the way, ahead of the
chariot.
That’s a lot of
stress, a lot of pressure, a lot exertion both emotional and physical. And not, in today’s lingo, a lot of
self-care.
For that matter,
just what has been the relationship between Elijah and God in all this? God directs Elijah to his hiding place,
and then to the widow’s home. From
there we get, when you break it down, an awful lot of Elijah telling God what
to do – raise the widow’s son from the dead; send fire from heaven; and, in
verse four of today’s chapter, let me die – “it is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life.” At Mount Horeb God engages in the
most dramatic and striking attempt to communicate with one of his own since
Moses’s adventures on that same mountain, and Elijah Still. Does. Not. Get It.
For Elijah the
consequences of his failure to listen in the silence are sharp; no less than
the end of his prophetic career resides in God’s words. Elijah is to go out and anoint, among
others, his own successor Elisha.
Elijah still has a couple of good moments left, but in effect his days
as a prophet are numbered. His
rather vain imagining that “I alone am left” also comes in for sharp rebuke;
The Lord points to a large number in Israel who have not gone after the worship
of Baal, contrary to Elijah’s complaint.
Even in the doing
of good, we can go wrong. If we
learned anything from Jephthah last week, hopefully we noticed that being
“moved by the Spirit of the Lord” doesn’t keep anyone from saying foolish
things and making horrible promises.
Here, God’s anointed prophet nonetheless behaves in ways damaging and
wearying to himself even in doing the Lord’s work. His zealousness for God not only doesn’t protect him from
the consequences of his own rashness.
In the end God has
to remind Elijah who is really in control. After providing fire from heaven at Elijah’s beckoning, God
reminds Elijah on Horeb that the fire (or the wind or the earthquake) is no
guarantee of God’s voice. God will
not be restricted to the old ways of speaking to God’s people. Wind and earthquake and fire might have
been signs of God’s presence and God’s word in the past, but that is no
guarantee God will speak through those now. To hear God, Elijah has to listen to the silence, and
somehow he can’t do it. Unlike Ray
Bradbury’s befuddled book-loving fireman Montag crying out to escape from the
noise, Elijah seems unable to break away from the spectacular and awe-inspiring
to find his way to meaning in the “sheer silence” of God.
Where does this
noise come from in our lives? We
certainly know pressure from work, pressure from family responsibilities,
pressure from trying to keep up with bills and take care of others and
ourselves, and maybe even pressure from the work of the church, teaching a
class or singing in the choir or serving on a committee or spending an evening
serving for CARITAS, or any number of other worthy and needed tasks in the life
of the church. We are concerned,
and rightly so, that the praise we sing to God in here and the worship we offer
to God in here are reflected in the ways our church or we as individual members
of it live in our town and participate in the life of our broader church. And yet, we must – must – find some way to clear the clutter and silence the chatter
that keeps us from hearing from God.
The pastor and
author Frederick Buechner points out that this endeavor is not even the same
thing as prayer. Buechner writes:
What
deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue
that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of
human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual
comfort, … than being able from time to time to stop that chatter including the
chatter of spoken prayer. If we choose to seek the silence of the holy place,
or to open ourselves to its seeking, I think there is no surer way than by
keeping silent.[i]
Oh,
how difficult a task that is!
Women, you need to sign up for that retreat this fall! Men, you need to demand one! As hard as it is, finding that time is
so essential for one’s spiritual health and relationship with God. If the lack of it was enough to bring
trouble to one of the most revered figures of the Old Testament, how can we
really think we can live without it?
Jesus
demonstrates this need again and again in the Gospels, sending the disciples
into town or off on a boat or somewhere else in order to have that time of
silence, of quiet, of listening for God in the silence or quiet.
This
time of silence with God is not necessarily about dramatic revelations or
earth-shaking commandments. The
silence may well be just that; the silence may hold no words at all. Still, to be present in that quiet,
that retreat from the noise and clutter of the world, is to hold open the
opportunity for the presence of God to comfort us or to change us.
One
of the songs of a singer/songwriter named Bruce Cockburn contains the following
lines:
Sometimes
you can hear His Spirit whispering to you
But
if God stays silent, what else can you do, except
Listen
to the silence; if you ever did you’d surely see
That
God won’t be reduced to an ideology[ii]
Indeed
we humans are rather proficient at reducing God to an ideology, or a weapon
with which to bash our enemies, or a “get out of Hell free” card. We fail to listen, and our God
increasingly starts to look and sound like a projection of our own preferences
and attitudes. We fail to listen,
and we lose touch with the source of our strength, the One whose love and grace
towards us are the only reason we can hope to be or to do … well, anything. We fail to listen and we flounder and
sink, our own strength betraying us.
God
speaks in many ways – in scripture, in worship, in music, and maybe even in
fire and earthquake and wind, and yes, in silence. Our challenge is to hear, which sometimes requires us to
step away, to step out into the sheer silence, and listen. God give us the strength to find and
hear that sheer silence that it may teach us and refresh us and renew us for
God’s work out in the noise of the world.
Amen.
Hymns: “Ye servants of God, your Master proclaim” (PH #477);
“O Savior, in this quiet place” (PH #390); “Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah” (PH
#281)
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